Know your donor class: How to make them pay if they try to steal your vote (spreadsheet links removed so this isn't re-deleted, instructions only)
Note: Though it's all public information collected with the instructions below, anytime I post a link to a spreadsheet with this data on this site, someone likes to make the comment or post do a little vanishing act. So, here's how to get this forbidden knowledge for yourself. Whatever lies they tell, it's always been your right to know your donor class.
Campaign donor boycotts both punish the perpetrators and defund their means of vote theft, and you can get your list in an easy spreadsheet form. Your Louisiana Ethics site, https://www.ethics.la.gov/CampaignFinanceSearch/SearchByName.aspx, will look up the campaign contributors to any local election. Here's how to do it in 4 easy steps:
- Type in their last name here, https://www.ethics.la.gov/CampaignFinanceSearch/SearchByName.aspx. This will bring in results if they campaign under a nickname.
- Now, click the blue name that comes up, and then scroll to the bottom of the page.
- Click the blue "View All Contributions Received" at the bottom left, just below the table.
- Finally, click the "Export Results to Spreadsheet (csv)" button. You will download a spreadsheet with a surprisingly readable list of campaign donors and dates.
So right now, you can search through it and find any local business. You already have a boycott list.
If you want to go a little further, with some very basic Excel macros you can also group the individual contributions into sums for a single candidate. The granularity of this data is also very powerful: each individual contribution has a date, so you can also note how frequently a donor still supported a candidate after they pushed something horrific.
What's really cool is that you can even combine multiple candidates using this method, if you're willing to copy/paste a bit. All of the spreadsheets follow the same format, so it's as easy as pasting everything after the headers. Doing this, you can do things like get a list of campaign donors for the 9 lawmakers who - to quote this headline - "reject adding exceptions for some rape cases to abortion ban".
With the date filter in the previous paragraphs, you can also get how much money was sent not just before, but also after they made that vote. Additionally, the fact that this data is deliberately not crawlable makes it a very powerful tool for humans to counter billionaire-funded bot farms. When you have a bot farm, you have the same AI slop, but you don't actually have anything that can't be stolen off a site. This is one case where being right is better than being rich.
And it really can be that easy to win. I was able to put together a spreadsheet of the top donors in that specific case. I'd post it, but it seems something is sweeping in and deleting any comment or post that contains a link to that list. Well, y'all have the instructions now on how to download this data; I guess save the instructions while you can, before they start deleting those as well.